I come up with new ideas all of the time. Most of us in the world of entrepreneurship do. What do you DO with them?
I bet a dollar to a donut (who came up with that, anyway?), that you have had hundreds of ideas that seemed great when you thought of them. And then they died or languished without anything coming of it.
Like the title says, good ideas don’t just happen. Someone has to take action, get clarity, become organized and focused and keep taking action!
Let’s talk about clarity. There was a time when I felt like the first thing I needed to do was get clarity. Many, many good ideas failed to get traction while I waited for myself to clear the fog and get the clarity I thought I needed to have before taking action.
Subsequently, I noticed that almost every venture I got involved in was a moving target. I soon realized that clarity was an evolving part of the process.
Real clarity came after I began taking action. I zig-zagged my way towards implementation by making mistakes and making adjustments. The more action I took, the clearer my objective became.
Every entrepreneur will tell you that the business they started out to create almost never ended up exactly how it was initially envisioned.
An example. In the early days of the Internet, I got the idea for a job board in a niche industry. The revenue model was for employers to pay to list jobs and it was moderately successful. It wasn’t long before companies interested in that niche were asking to advertise. Before I knew it banner advertising was a significant percentage of the monthly revenue.
Eventually, I realized a lot of those advertisers were part of a niche within the niche desperate to get introduced to these prospective employees. I put up a form on the site to request more information. Responses flooded in.
I began a subscription service for advertisers to receive those “leads” and revenues exploded. It became the primary source of revenue. The visitors to my site had told me what would be valuable to them. All I had to do was listen and implement (take action).
Never in my wildest imagination did I plan to have a lead generation business. As I took actions, created the business and the traffic, tried new things and paid attention the clarity came.
The Takeaway. As soon as you get a new idea write it down and immediately annotate it with an action you can take to move it forward. If its something for the future put on a list called “Backburner” but make sure you review that list every month.
Sometimes those old ideas even solve new problems that pop up. Other times you may decide the time has come to take action.
